Things are rough for in-house people all over. Many of my friends have been let go, and I myself have recently moved back into the wilds that is freelance design. I can’t tell you about how not to get fired. I can’t tell you how to make yourself a value add to your company. If you’re doing your job as a designer, you’re already adding value. This post is about what to do when you’ve been given The Talk.

For the sake of time, I’m going to assume it’s a done deal. Your boss has called you in, told you that you were out, and that’s that. HR has come by and told you about things like COBRA (your health benefits, not snakes) and unemployment options. Your severance package, if there is one, has been laid out, and it probably has some strings.

You’re Out. Now What?

Assuming you weren’t fired because you were lazy or because you were a bad/risky employee, this time is very important. This is when you’ll set the tone for how you finally leave, as well as how people remember you. As much fun as it would be to go into a friends office and bitch about how you were just let go for no reason, I suggest keeping quiet. If you were in a small company, chances are you worked with everyone on some level. The boss/owner/whoever is in charge will make an announcement to everyone. Going around and talking about how much of a jerk they are only burns the bridge of a very important reference that you’ll want in the future. You can get angry at home, or better yet, at the bar. If you’ve got good work friends, you may be able to score some free drinks out of this.

Lists and Lists of Lists

If you were a productive designer, you probably had some projects going on at the moment of termination. Make a list of each of your currently pending projects, what stage they are in, and what actions are left for completion. The number one thing to keep in mind is to not burn the people you work with. All of these people, from your boss down to the newest account rep can be great references. How you act under this kind of pressure will be etched into their minds. BE PROFESSIONAL.

Designers are usually pack rats. We collect stuff that we see and that we use. Our computers are full of old concepts, and our sketchbooks are full of ideas that never made it. Gather all of that up. Make a list of each project that you had a big impact on. That, combined with a list of your favorite projects that just looked neat, will be the portfolio material you take with you.

Another thing that designers collect is fonts. When you come into a new position with your own fonts that you’ve collected, make sure to take them with you. Many font sets are copyrighted, as such, you can’t just leave them installed on the computer where you were working. That’s illegal. Make a list of the fonts that you’ve installed, and then remove them from the system. This way, anything that’s yours stays with you, but you won’t screw over the next person who needs to edit that Illustrator file.

Know What You Signed

In a lot of industries, you have to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs). In a broad stroke, these say that you won’t talk about or show the things you worked on while you were there. No giving away the secret recipe or the magic formula. Generally, NDAs have an out. Be sure to read your NDA, and any other agreements you’ve signed to make sure that by showing material in your portfolio, you’re not opening yourself up to being sued.

The last NDA that I signed stated that everything I worked on was considered ’secret’ unless the owner of the information published the information, or made it available to anyone not under an NDA. So, once the owner (in some cases a client) had made the final product public, then I was free to showcase the product as well.

If there’s something really nice that you want to show off, I suggest taking it to your boss and asking them if it’s ok to include it in your portfolio. In the event that the piece contains sensitive corporate or financial information, offer to substitute dummy numbers or sterilized text in place of sensitive data. Unless you’re a copywriter, you’re showing off the design of the piece. The text isn’t relevant.

Another type of agreement to be aware of is a non-compete. This usually applies to account executives and managers, but depending on the industry you’re working in, it’s possible that you might be limited as to which types of industries you can go into when you leave your employer. It’s a good practice to have the HR or office manager make you a copy of everything in your employee file. Especially documents you’ve signed.

Taking Files?

It’s safe to assume that most of your design work is going to be done on a computer. As such, you’ll probably want to take your source file with you. This can get tricky. The electronic versions are just as much your work product as the physical versions. Keep in mind that when you clear the list of things you want to take, be sure to include the final electronic versions of your work. I took the Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign and PDF versions of my work, but left the source text files and excel spreadsheets. Make sure to keep any linked stock images, or external source files that you’ve made to help out with your work. These scratch files are work product and part of your contribution.

Things to Avoid

DO NOT DELETE ANY FILES! If, on your last day, you get caught deleting work files, you’ll probably loose your severance, and may be liable for a law suite. You’ve probably got a bunch of personal data on the machine, but before you go around deleting everything in sight, make sure that you’re covered. It’s safe to say that your next job will not like it if they know you went out and deleted everything on your system before you left.

DON’T BE A JERK! I’ve said it before, but it’s important: these are your references now. Talking bad about the bosses, the other co-workers, or being rude to clients is the kind of thing that will get you horrible references in the future. At this point, your goal needs to be to get as much as you can from your now former employer. And this includes glowing references about how much of a professional you were, even under those most trying of circumstances.

DON’T FORGET TO GET A LETTER! Since you’ve spent the past few days being a professional, now’s a great time to get your coworkers and managers to put it in writing. While you’re still fresh in their minds, have them put down their thoughts about you in a letter of recommendation. Going to another job interview and saying ‘yes, I was fired, but not for being a bad employee. In fact, here’s a letter from my former boss telling you how great a guy I am.’ This will say a LOT about you as a worker if your former employer is saying good things about you.

Bottom Line

The bottom line is, keep your head on. Don’t let emotions and bad ideas screw up your future. As a designer, you’re probably used to dealing with rapidly evolving situations and fluid goals that shift from day to day. Approach this as a design project. The more time you bitch, the longer it takes you get back to being productive. If you leave with your reputation in tact and your based covered, then you’ll be miles ahead of others who weren’t so smart.

If you’ve sat through more than 5 presentations in your life, you’ve most likely seen PowerPoint used badly. Yellow text on a white background (called a Ziegler in some circles) or a bunch of bad MS clip art files thrown on top of a cheesy looking repeating background image. The list of PP faux pas can go on forever, but thankfully, some people are starting to get it right. This isn’t a post about those people.

In my line of work, we use PowerPoint as a means of doing page layout. I cringed when I first saw that somebody was using this screen presentation program for doing print design. How dare these dullards try to undermine the established reign of design software from Adobe. I must stop this, I thought.

And then I came up against reality. There are only two comps in our office that have Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign installed on them. And of those, only one person in our office can do more than edit text using the software.

This means that every time I make something in Illustrator, it is VERY likely that I’ll be the one doing the edits and updates on that piece. If the six becomes a nine, then I have to mind. I’m the one editing and updating it. This isn’t a problem for things that we’re sending out to a printer. But when it comes to simple things that we’re going to produce in-house (small presentations, information binders and the like) it becomes a chore to have to keep going back into Illustrator in order to maintain the info.

Enter PowerPoint. Since we deal with large volumes of data, our account execs work primarily in Excel. Spreadsheets are king, and that’s just how it is. If you want a table pulled into Creative Suite, you have two basic options: 1) rebuild the setup in InDesign, and the copy and paste it to your other Adobe software, or 2) export the data from Excel as a PDF, and then try pull that PDF data into whatever you’re doing.

The first method is time consuming, and tedious, but you get to maintain full editability in your data. The second method is faster, but you can forget about editing the data easily. Many words are broken up into individual letters, and some letters aren’t even in fonts, but are turned into outlines at random.

PowerPoint fixes both of these issues. I can do a simeple page layout (most of our layouts have to be simple because we’re dealing with big freakin’ charts and lots of numbers), and I can keep the numbers and table structure editable.

The biggest selling point here isn’t that I can edit it. I can edit nearly anything. The draw is that almost anybody else can edit the files. All you need is a copy of MS Office. From the CEO using the iMac down to the junior account exec working off of a laptop in the broom closet can work on this file, make corrections, and update the numbers. They don’t need me anymore, atleast not for this task.

By working in PowerPoint for smaller projects involving volitile data sets, I  can turn over the file to be edited much quicker by someone else after I’ve done the designerly stuff to  it.I’m now free to focus on the 4 page brochures, or the cool mailer for one of our much more fun clients.

I balked at bringing myself down to the level of PowerPoint design. It’s beneath me, I though. No real designer should have to work in such a medium.

Now I see the reality of the situation: I can dash out a quick piece, let other people fill in the gaps in information, and I’m free to work on important items. I don’t have to deal with changing the numbers or the plan names every five minutes.

While tough at first, Designing in PowerPoint has saved me time and allowed me to put my energy to work in more efficient ways.

One caveate: I’m only offering this praise to PowerPoint 2007. Office 2k3 is crap.

As a rule, the AIGA (as well as any designer worth their Wacom) is against SPEC work. You’re giving away your talent for free, opening yourself up to be ripped off, and making life more difficult for other designers as a whole. On the hole, SPEC work is bad. But is it ALWAYS bad?

When I was job searching, I had a potential employer ask me to do a redesign of a city’s web portal. They wanted working HTML pages, a news crawler at the bottom, new images and a fresh and flexible design. I wanted the job, and I was considering doing the assignment. I asked if this was a design for a client of theirs, and I was told that the city in question was not a client of this firm. It was while I was doing research for the project that I found a RFP (request for proposal) from the city in question for a portal site redesign. The RFP listed ALL of the qualifications, verbatim, that I was given by this potential employer. When I asked them about it, I was told that the three of designers competing for this position would have their site designs pitched to the city, and if the firm was chosen for the job, then the designer that produced the bid-winning site would be hired.

I withdrew my name, and, after some discussion with the HR person I was working with, I found out that the other two designers had done the same, but without the knowledge of the RFP. That’s a great example of bad SPEC.

But what about good spec? Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve worked with several people over the past 5 or so years. Many of the were more experienced than me, and for that I’m grateful. I like being around people who know more than me. All I have to do is sit back, ask the occasional question, and I get to soak up their knowledge and experience.

On the rare time that I’m stuck being the experienced one in the room, I find myself wishing I’d written down a lot of what I tell people. That way, I could send them that info, and not have to repeat it.

This post is going to cover Print Production. I’ll go over some basic terms and help with areas that usually present common problems to first time print producers. So, let’s dive in.

Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of people like to write about leaving their job to go freelance. Writers are leaving the desk jobs to become freelance bloggers. Designers have done it for a while now; shuffling off the coils and chains of regular work so as to allow their design fancies room to fly. Photographers, singers, producers of entertainment and media, the list goes on and on.

These people derive a self-imbued higher status than their clock punching peers because they live on the hairy edge. They’re out in the trenches making it by their wits alone. Well, bully for them. If you can do it, bravo for you.

I hate it.

Nobody takes out Social Security taxes for you. Or FICA. Or State (if you happen to live in a state that charges rent). You have to deal with the clients that don’t pay their bills. You are the one negotiating the fee for your work, and you are the one responsible for it’s failure. Success will likely go to the man or woman who had the insight to pay you.

Read the rest of this entry »

Designers, coders and creative people in all areas seem to share a common trait: We ofter end up doing things that are beyond our ability. Whether it’s taking on a 3d rendering project when we’ve never so much as opened a modeling program, or working on a web application even when we have zero experience with PHP or JavaScript, we seem to love taking on jobs when we have no idea on how to do them.

I’m guilty of this as well. My first design job was at a small print company in Cleveland, TN. It was a magazine publisher, and I had never worked in the industry. At all. It was a 1 week deadline crunch to get 5 different magazines out. I said I could do it.

It was the hardest week of my life, and one of the best.

Now, fast forward a year or so later. I was interviewing for at job in the communications department of a fairly large non-profit. They asked me if I had any experience with After Effects.  My experience at the time with the program included me opening the program, not being able to figure out how to get a video clip into the timeline, and then closing the program in frustration after an hour of trying to use the damn thing.

So, when asked whether I could use the program, I said yes. I smiled, and, with poise and confidence, told them a direct lie. I got the job, and a week into it, I was given an assignment that would need to be done in AE. Now, I had to put up or shut. I learned to get around in After Effects in about an hour, and had the project done later that day. It was simple stuff, so I was ok. If it had been more complex, I would have been screwed.

Every creative person I know does the same thing. I’ve got friends who do application development for Facebook. I know one of them who has taken on a couple of jobs in the past that he couldn’t do. My oldest friend Josh, I know he’s done it a couple of times.

This is the kind of thing that we tend to do a lot of when we’re starting out. We’ll take on projects that we have absolutely NO business doing, let alone charging money for. The next thing you know, you’re spending over half of your time doing those projects. Before long, the thing you once had no business getting into is now your primary business.

My first thought when talking to new designers is to tell them to stay out of those proejcts that are way out of their realm. Those assignments are hard, and they’ll make you want to kill yourself or others at some point. But they’re also good and necessary. Creative people as a whole are curious. We get into things that we see that are shiny and neat, and as much as it can hurt at first, it is essential for us to keep finding new areas to stretch and grow.

We must constantly be reaching for things out of our reach. At it’s core, creative work across any field - engineering, software development, design, accounting - is about one thing: Problem Solving. It’s what we do. We see a challenge or an obstacle, and we try to get through it. It’s our creativity and ingenuity that sparks our imaginations into seeing a solution where other people only see a problem.

I love what I do because I love to solve problems. I like to find ways of working through something difficult, and there’s no easier way to find problems to solve then by jumping into something you don’t understand.

It’s like the game Myst. Some of you will know the game, others can try it out at GameTap. Myst gave you almost no information up front, dropped you in the middle of an uninhabited island, and told you to figure out what was going on. You don’t shoot at anybody, and nobody dies. You just have to fix what ever is wrong. But you don’t even know what it’s supposed to be like when it’s right. The game can be maddening, but it was one of the best selling games for many years, and one of my all time favorites. And, I’ve noticed, many of the creative people that are close to my age also have fond memories of it.

I encourage everyone to take on a project that is out of your realm, even if just a bit. Do work for a client that is beyond what you know, and find a way to make it work. You’ll be glad you did when it’s over. Unless you screw up.

Merry Christmas, all.

My name is Kevin, and I’m a designer living and working in the Atlanta area. I’ve been here for a couple of months, and I’ve decided to start this blog. My goal is to make this site a place where I can write up some tutorials, and offer advice to young designers.

I’ll be covering topics such as dealing with client, contracts for designers, how to work print shops, and some basic design knowledge that you’re not taught in school, and maybe don’t know where to find. I want to help designers avoid some of the pitfalls and problems that I’ve encountered. I’m open to questions, and I welcome any and all feedback.

For my first post, I was hoping to do a write up on CSS and how to use divs in place of table elements. Instead, I’ve found a nice hot button issue to start us off: SPEC work.

Spec work, or speculative work, is something that, unfortunately, is all too common in our industry. Spec work is when a client asks a designer to produce work for free while dangling the possibility of payment in front of the them. A great example of this can be seen at times in places like the Craigs List Art/Media/Design Jobs section. They go something like this: Read the rest of this entry »